Education superclass?

[Amber2]

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/iainmartin1/100245274/it-is-much-worse-than-sir-john-major-says-a-new-superclass-is-being-created-in-london/

This is interesting coming from John Major ...sounds like more lobbying along the lines of the Sutton Trust but do people really think it's much worse than it ever has been..? and this is do with with the inexorable rise of London...and the global money flowing in there...and so to creating an elite superclass of private schools also ...not just any old private school but a small handful of elite ones, applications to which have reached record numbers, presumably more and more from London and from overseas with over inflation rises in fees pricing out the traditional middle classes that used to be able to afford these schools.

There was an edition of Radio 4s Science programme that went into the evidence and also, I think touched on Gaussian Bell curves about 6 weeks ago. ? Still on iplayer. It will be much more informative than I am although the twin component of this study is fascinating. The scientists from opposing sides were only disagreeing on how large the proportion genes contributed was, but more worryingly were equally concerned how this information in the future may influence education policy.

What is "intelligence," anyway? What you do with your cognitive abilities, and how you compensate for your relative weaknesses, depends on your personality and environment. Intelligence does not equal output. People with hugely lopsided abilities can achieve vastly more than people who are, technically, more all-round "intelligent." They can also achieve hugely less - it all depends how they choose to use what they have, how much drive and self-belief they have, how they are reacted to, what opportunities and support they are given. Athletic ability alone doesn't make you a world-class athlete, either. For all the athletes who make it, there could be thousands of people out there who had greater physical potential, but chose to sit on their backsides indulging in competitive crisp eating. Of course we don't all have limitless potential, but that doesn't mean we have any accurate way of measuring exactly what any one person's potential is and what they will be able to make of it.

Snowbells I wrote a long reply but lost it. But what you say about hereditary athletic ability backs up my argument about hereditary 'intelligence'. For example, Mo Farah's son or daughter might have the perfect genes for being a long distance runner but if Mo were to let them watch TV and eat chocolate and not do any sport, they wouldn't stand a chance.

The same is true of neurological development. If it isn't developed properly through childhood then any potential is wasted. Every child should have a chance of a good education regardless of their genetic input. Some may turn into Steven Hawkins or Mary Beard, most will not, but their brains will at least have had that chance to get there.

Genetic IQ is an argument based on hot air. MENSA promote a lot of research that backs up their theory, creationists do the same but it doesn't fit with theories of evolution and the evidence to hand of the massive impact of environment over physical and neurological development. Development does not stop at birth, it continues until 18 years, sometimes to 21. Of course environment has a bigger impact than genes.

Please look at this map and explain why Africans have such a low IQ. Genetically inherited? In the countries where education is an important part of life, IQ is higher.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn21705-best-evidence-yet-that-a-single-gene-can-affect-iq.html#.UpRcZXZX-ph

I am horrified that education policy could ever base itself on these half-baked theories. Hardly uses our intelligence to its best ability.

And I do have to add that those running research into this subject will always have a bias - they will all be well educated and will have spent their life being told that other people are not as naturally intelligent as they are. It will be very hard for them personally to question that. Hopefully they have enough emotional intelligence to be able to put that bias to one side.

I am a bit cross about this because decades of research into the causes of child development problems, such as learning difficulties and autism have been lost because of this random bias towards a genetic cause for high IQ. In itself this is disability discrimination.

From the new scientist April 2012:

"It's important they've found this gene, but it took a sample of 20,000 people to find it, precisely because the effect is so small," says Robert Plomin at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and lead author of a groundbreaking study in 2007 which failed to find any single genes of disproportionate importance in intelligence. "If it's this hard to find an effect of just 1 per cent, what you're really showing is that the 'cup' is 99-per-cent empty," he says.

Here's the world IQ map, I posted the wrong link below.

Gah my IQ clearly not working - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_IQ_Lynn_Vanhanen_2006_IQ_and_Global_Inequality.png

Besides all this, I thought it had been established that environment can switch different genes on or off? Also, that taxi drivers who have spent several years learning "the knowledge" can actually be shown to have enlarged an area of their hippocampus? Then there are people with brain damage, or whole chunks of the brain removed, whose brains seem to have found alternative ways of achieving things normally controlled by the part of the brain that in their case has been damaged. It seems to me, the education system is in general merely looking for those who can be taught with least effort and imagination what the powers that be think they ought to know. This "education system" often didn't suit people now regarded as remarkable contributors to society.

I agree with passedgo
What is IQ anyway? - the tests 'we' design. Can you improve your IQ score to an extent through practice - I think you can.
The 'classic' type of it takes two men 2 days to dig a hole, how long would it take 1 man ...the people who get it wrong can work on realising it might be a 'trick' - the first answer that pops into their head is probably wrong.
Some I think are pretty random - I did a test in a book once with two other people - one question - an x is to y as z is to ?- I got right and they got wrong. It made sense to me but I couldn't explain why... it was just logical....they couldn't see an association. (I don't think that made me more intelligent)
Do an IQ test somewhere were fewer people go to school -and of course the results will be lower.

If you haven't been taught 'shapes' - square, triangle, circle - you won't see the same patterns/associations as people with a 'western' education, the people who design the tests. Your brain is dealing with a foreign concept anyway that 'shapes' exist and 'go together'.
I'm sure they don't ask people who have never seen a train a question about trains and stations...but maybe they do...
Maybe if you life consists of trying to survive, hunt, find water, grow crops etc those are the brain pathways that are well developed - whereas if you don't need to worry about these things other pathways develop (at the expense of the survival pathways). But is that better? (if there was a global disaster I know which kind of intelligence I'd prefer to have)
Things like why lower working class children (in general) do less well academically - is it because they are given poor education from birth (so the brain pathways are less well developed) ? - or because they start their life in that bracket because genetically their ancestors were less academic and they have the same genes? (or because genetically their ancestors were less greedy?)
And aristocracy got their wealth being more cunning (more intelligent) and less empathetic?? With less bright ones now because of inbreeding? or because they come from 'stock' that got their wealth historically from just being good at fighting battles!

I find the whole subject fascinating ...genes vs environment how much is nature and how much is nurture. I agree with the view is it is a mixture - and very complex.
I wouldn't think gene switching comes into this - that is caused by chemical triggers in cells and all cells contain the same genes. 'Brain genes' will be switched on in the brain and switched off in the kidneys. Genes will be switched on/off in eg liver if there is a high level of insulin (glucose) in the blood.
If there is a gene for 'intelligence' - for example one that bestows an ability to store and retain access more easily or the ability to utilise certain areas of the brain more readily (it is generally accepted the more you use a pathway to a piece of information stored in your brain the more likely you are to remember it for longer) I can't see any advantage of switching off that gene...I think it would be on permanently...

Which means "IQ" is what society currently perceives to be the most useful type of intelligence. Not that "society" always gets that right - it's not as if the world seems to be heading in a wholly fruitful direction at the moment.

I have a reasonable IQ (upper end, far far from genius) so not sour grapes ...and I'm part of society - and I don't rate it!
I think a lot of this discussion is whether we believe that being successful equates to earning a lot of money/being powerful. If that makes you happy - but as a society we come out as being less happy and content than lots of much 'poorer' societies...
Honestly I would rather my children were comfortable and happy than massively 'successful', powerful, rich and unhappy...

I do hope sarragossa a few posts back wasn't hooking Learning Difficulties and low IQ together. 10% of the population have learning difficulties and that occurs in people who achieve at every level in tests of IQ.

I can't believe that people's intellectual abilities and qualities do not have a genetic component just as other aspects of their physiology. Why would brain cells be any less subject to a complex mix of genetic predisposition and environment in the same way as, say, Breast cells.

However since the education system does not get it's hands on human beings until they are 3 at the earliest when a lot of the nature / nurture equation will have been resolved and I don't think anyone would advocate removing under 3s from their home environment for the purposes of creating a socially engineered educational superclass I completely agree with rabbitstew that the real problem is that schools at the moment are sausage factories for those most easily taught in traditional ways, generally by people who best learnt in those ways, and increasingly our poor DCs seen as receptacles for stuff. The assumption that all our brains work in the same way and are on some sort of linear racetrack to an endpoint is not one that businesses or universities would embrace. It is the ultimate irony that whilst Gove is making sure the traditional racetrack is straight and true, the MOD, along with business and universities, are busy creating environments that enable those with differently wired brains who tend to struggle with traditional school environments eg those with SpLDs and ASD to give the benefit of their strengths, in holistic thinking, spotting patterns, creative thinking etc etc.

The sad thing is that the teaching methods that work for those with different learning styles are not exclusive in the way that traditional ones can be. They can benefit large sections of a classroom. It is only a failure of imagination that has led to these going almost uncovered in teacher training and development. It is shown by the resurgence in phonics in the teaching of literacy skills, when I struggled to learn to read in the 70s it was mainly because it was taught entirely through look / see and that was never going to work for me. Now phonics are something that not only are now seen as of benefit to the majority but also give those with SpLDs tools, which can be worked on in intensive intervention. But of course Gove has introduced phonics tests which as I understand it strip them of context and any established word patterns that have been absorbed, just to make sure those with Learning Difficulties get kicked off the track......

'I think a lot of this discussion is whether we believe that being successful equates to earning a lot of money/being powerful.'

Yes, and it's amazing how infrequently that gets spotted here on MN

I would add: 'earning a lot of money/being perceived to be powerful'

I should add in the interests of some sort of connection to the thread, these "elite" schools do go out of their way to set entrance exams that do actually look at candidates as individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Their entrance procedures are not first past the post horse races but test candidates in a number of ways alongside school references and interviews to try and identify "potential", especially in bursary candidates. Some are better at it than others, but a lot do find that subsequently they have admitted around 10% with different learning difficulties and some are doing more than paying lip service to catering for their needs.

The Heads are very outspoken in their condemnation of Gove's reforms too.

Of course you could argue they are catering to the needs of a niche in terms of the characteristics of their intellectual abilities, whose importance to society is exaggerated in the process, but at least they understand their niche.

But Gove wants us all to compete with China. Look at the global IQ map I referred to below. The learning style for successful IQ is the learning style of China. China outstrips the rest of the world in terms of IQ rate. If that is the goal of elite schools fine there is a place for it. But should great IQ rates be the goal for everyone, and if not, what alternative are we offering - a handful of progressive school and a threadbare exhausted secondary system

The goalposts are simply wrong.

Yes, Gove would want to emulate a hugely polluted country, stuffed full of impoverished people, with a tiny, corrupt, highly educated and powerful elite pulling the strings.

passedgo are you familar with the Chinese education system? It is a legacy of the Imperial system which made entry to it's elite, it's bureaucrats, the subject of extremely competitive examinations which were extreme tests of rote learning. Even now next to no critical or creative thinking is required to pass examinations which is why you see newspaper reports of children hooked up to drips rote learning vast quantities of model answers. That is the public system, even in Hong Kong. These very competitive examinations do however cover more advanced levels of mathematics.

In fact where Asian populations score more highly than western populations is in tests of non verbal reasoning (which remember are tests of pictorial concepts). They do worse in verbal reasoning. Nobody understands why exactly. One theory is that you learn the Mandarin and Cantonese languages and dialects differently to western languages. They are relatively simple in terms of tense and sentence structure (tense for instance is mainly contextual "I go shops yesterday") but from a very young age you have to learn thousands of mainly pictorial characters. In other words verbal and non verbal reasoning develop in different ways to in the west.

In any case with Gove's beloved Singapore in the lead there is a battle in China and the diaspora between the traditionalist's and those that believe that the lack of training in critical and creative thinking skills in their education systems is "putting them at a disadvantage in the global marketplace" (do those words remind you of anyone?

I would add that none of the elite schools would entertain even for one moment being more like Chinese Schools. Not least because they have so many Chinese students there exactly because they are not like Chinese Schools. If anything they value the training in critical and creative thinking above and beyond what is required for public examination as Happy Gardening outlined manifested in Winchesters approach to the History Curriculum.

Regardless of the way in which Chinese IQ develops, their IQ is highest in the world and that's a lot of people being educated very well according to Gove, Elite Schools and MENSA standards.

It is all fascinating, completely under-researched (in terms of genetics and neurology) and complex. There is no ideal education system and there is no ideal genetic disposition but there is inequality - and that is what Major is on about in his article and I agree with him.

I must say I think the national curriculum for Primary children is excellent and shouldn't be tampered with but I still think that chidren aren't learning the basics at the right time, particularly with maths. I still don't understand how my children left primary not knowing their times tables. I learnt nothing about the Romans in primary school but at least I knew the answer to 6 x 7.

passedgo if your children left school without learning their times tables it must be a while ago, or it must have been a poor school. Certainly amongst my DDs peers, state and private, and they are now past primary age, there was a huge emphasis from year 3 on learning times tables, with lots of ground laid in developing mental arithmetic skills as part of the curriculum in lower years. I would actually say that their Maths skills are more deeply grounded in my DDs peers than mine were taught by rote in a traditional school in the 60s.

However I don't disagree with you on inequality, I just think China is a complete red herring, the Chinese education system arose in an entirely different cultural context and is subject to strains of it's own. And Gove cherry picks around the world those aspects of systems that suit his own dogma, trading on crowd pleasing stereotypes. And Mensa as I recall use non verbal tests of IQ?

The issue with inequality though is not going to be resolved by top down dogma from career politicians. Boris I see this week, though he has no formal involvement in education is trying to muscle in on the kudos of what has been achieved in terms of evening out inequality in London. Though actually what the London challenge proved was that improvement will come from professionals applying their expertise and applying best practise without interference from above.

Regarding the 'elite schools' - Perhaps it is the critical thinking that gives children the real advantage - perhaps not the IQ.

Off piste a little again - My own education was very poor and passive, but I have good analytical skills. These were developed mostly by discussions at home, overheard as I was growing up between my father and friends who would come round and debate the issues of the day.

My father's own education was classical and traditional with lots of rote learning, forced by punishment at a state run boarding school. He then went on to teach 'remedial' children as they used to call them - an attempt to rebel against his own harsh education.

His own critical thinking/debating skills developed from a massive knowledge base in complex areas, particularly philosophy and history. Where I found him lacking was in picking apart the media, he often couldn't spot where stories were pushed from an angle. He was easily led by campaigns.

This is the aspect of education I think is essential in the modern world - that children are taught to read newspapers and mobile phone contracts to see the catch, or the bias without jumping to conspiracy theories but with clarity.

Interesting that the non-questioning education system of Dad's era preceded the era of propaganda campaigns that led to the genocides of war.

Interesting also that our modern, complacent education system has led to millions of people in debt, committed to contracts they don't understand the implications of and a monetary system that only bankers understand.

Knowledge is definitely power, regardless of how you gain it, but understanding that knowledge and picking it apart is true power.

shooting - re maths, I was told that it was my job to teach them their times tables. She is 15 now so pre-London Challenge but went to a high results primary.

passedgo - that's definitely not the case, now. In my experience, it's times tables and mental arithmetic ad nauseam in primary schools these days.

As usual, it strikes me as a case of forcing the pendulum to swing wildly too far in the other direction when it had already readjusted to a sensible position by itself before all the ludicrously over the top interference.

My idea of 'elite school' and one I would like to have everywhere is one that is run with the Harkness Round Table as used at Phillips Exeter Academy in the US. It's not about rote learning but individual learning, and discussing everything across the table. Of course, small class sizes would be needed.

That system bolsters (1) knowledge sharing, (2) individual learning, (3) critical and creative thinking, and (4) confidence to speak up and participate in group discussions.

That sort of teaching would prepare children well for life - particularly for jobs in business/politics/media/academia… well, all the desirable jobs really, where the above skills would be very much needed.

DEFINITELY NOT CHINA OR THE LIKE...

I still think it's about 50./50 how you do - genes and environment and in fact contrary to what the last page of the thread suggests latest research moves towards genes being more not less important. The human genome project has made huge strides in that area.

If we were all a blank slate then you could take any children at 11+ whether supposedly with an IQ of 80 or 150 and they would all do well at the very academic selective state grammar schools. Clearly in reality that would not be so as their genes do matter. If genes did not matter then the comps and grammars would get the same % into Oxbridge and they don't.